The chance of a Boris Johnson comeback has risen dramatically since Liz Truss’s resignation. Over 40 MPs have so far come out to publicly back him while today’s papers are filled with briefings about how the former prime minister would be best placed to save the party from electoral doom. Now it’s no great secret
It’s bad news for Rishi Sunak on the front page of the Daily Mail. No, not the splash about a revolt on Monday’s Privileges Committee vote but rather the teasing trailer for the paper’s latest recruit. A mystery ‘erudite new columnist’ is trailed on the front of today’s edition, with the Mail promising that their writing will
The Privileges Committee has published its report on whether Boris Johnson deliberately misled parliament over partygate. It is damning. The 30,000-word document finds that he committed multiple contempts of parliament, including deliberately misleading the house, deliberately misleading the committee, breaching confidence, impugning the committee and the democratic process of the house and ‘being complicit in
Boris Johnson formally resigned as an MP yesterday – but don’t expect theformer PM to throw in the towel any time soon. After a pretty unedifying slanging match with Rishi Sunak in the press about his resignation honours’ list, Johnson stepped down from his role as the MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip. But, Boris wasn’t quite done torpedoing Sunak’s desperate efforts to preserve the fragile Tory peace since becoming leader last
Boris Johnson has always been an enthusiastic proponent of the long unfashionable ‘great man’ theory of history. As he argued in his short biography of Winston Churchill, Churchill was a living refutation of the notion that great men and women are just ‘meretricious bubbles on the vast tides of social history’, a ‘withering retort to
Boris Johnson will be led into the Covid inquiry this morning like a condemned man. We have all seen enough of this inquiry to know the line of questioning he will receive: one that will try to portray him as a bumbling fool who rejected scientific advice to lock down, killing many thousands of people in
The triviality-obsessed Covid Inquiry has today been having fun with Dominic Cummings’s emails and finding rude words he used about colleagues. Trying to draw anything substantial from this is hard but one line did jump out at me: Boris Johnson saying ‘I no longer buy all this NHS overwhelmed stuff’. The inquiry should be asking:
These are testing times indeed for longstanding members of the ‘Boris Johnson is nothing like Donald Trump’ fraternity. Once again, the British blond bombshell is at the centre of a giant political controversy in lock step with the American one. And once again he seems perfectly happy to make politics all about himself. As a longtime
Nine months after Boris Johnson left Downing Street, his list of resignation honours has today finally been finally published. Here is the full list of those who have received honours: Order of the Companions of Honour. Members of the Order of the Companions of Honour Sir William Nigel Paul CashChair of the European Scrutiny Committee.
Ping! An email pops up in Steerpike’s inbox. ‘Boris Johnson’s memoir acquired by HarperCollins’ roars the subject line, heralding the arrival of an effusive press release to mark the exciting news. Not content with earning £250,000 per speech and unveiling portraits of himself, it seems our former PM has decided that the time is now
The real victor of these local elections? Boris Johnson. According to Oscar Wilde, the only thing in life worse than being talked about, is not being talked about. It’s a sign of Boris Johnson’s skill in attracting headlines that even as the Conservatives suffer a shellacking at the local elections, his being turned away from
It’s one year today since Boris Johnson resigned as prime minister, following mass resignations in the ministerial ranks. At the time Johnson hinted he would return, but 12 months later he is no longer an MP. Meanwhile the Tories have fallen further back in the polls. The last YouGov poll taken before Johnson resigned had
It’s fair to say today that Boris Johnson and Tucker Carlson don’t like each other much. After the invasion of Ukraine, Boris, the former journalist and Prime Minister, accused Carlson, the journalist often tipped to be a future president of the United States, of ‘intimidating’ Republicans who might otherwise help the West stand up to
In his most recent column for the Mail, Boris Johnson fires a shot at, among other things, ‘the leftie twittersphere’. Lest we forget, that would be the same Boris Johnson that, during his time as prime minister, told us there was ‘nothing wrong with being woke’; who seemed remarkably unbothered about mass illegal immigration; who
Seeing Boris Johnson’s byline in the Daily Mail, I felt a flare of the affection which made me break free from my blue-collar tribalism and vote Tory for the first time in 2019. I remember thinking that the experience was rather like losing one’s virginity; worrying about it for months, then secretly planning it, then
Boris Johnson, so the joke goes, will always be remembered as the third prime minister to have been brought down by…Boris Johnson. After bringing down his old rival David Cameron by campaigning for Brexit, and then helping to bring down Theresa May by campaigning against her soft Brexit, Johnson then set the stage for his
On Saturday, I was in a public library, waiting for an old guy to finish with the Times. But he seemed to be reading every word of every section, and sort of peering at it frowningly in an annoying way. So I did something I hardly ever do: I picked up the Daily Mail. I had forgotten
It has been less than a fortnight since Boris Johnson’s premiership exploded so spectacularly just three short years after his triumphant election victory, and he became the latest Tory PM to perish at the hands of his own party. Yet two weeks on, the people who brought him down are already wondering if they hit
Where have Boris Johnson’s diaries and WhatsApp messages gone? The row over the demands of the Covid Inquiry for evidence from the former prime minister and his aide Henry Cook took another twist yesterday, with his team insisting that he has already handed over all the relevant material to the Cabinet Office and that it
‘It’s the case against Boris Johnson’